Sitting on my new couch, purchased to replace the three year old futon which got too stiff and slanted for my old back, I was reading Margaret Atwood’s recent memoir of this name, hard to put down because of 1) its transparent prose style 2) the out-loud laughs its humor continually elicited 3) my love for  her books as they appeared during the 1970’s when we were newcomers to Canada and 4) its references to people I had met (Bev Howard Gibbon) and places I had been or been involved with (North Bay, Camp White Pine) and later, the Northrop Frye archive at the University of Toronto.

But when I came across her mention of an obscure place not in Canada but in Provence, France, where she’d stayed in 1971, I stopped reading and started remembering:

Mention of this location, the scene of gatherings of  superstars of British and French Cinema, brought me up short. “Grimaud” has remained in my porous memory ever since I spent two days there in Summer 1962, age 20, nine years earlier than Atwood and her husband. It was  at the summer home of Frank Green, another famous British film personage, together with my ephemeral traveling companion, Sarah. Not wanting to lose hold of that passing interlude, I described it in a letter to my parents shortly afterward which they kept and gave me in my 50’s in the packet they’d saved, that I scanned and copied into this blog  during the 2010’s, and today converted from script to the text below, using Google Drive and Macmail applications.

[transcribed with Google Drive] And no amount of retracing steps, grubbing through burning sand, etc. would be of avail. What to do again? We started to hike to the nearest town with the intention of going to the Gendarmerie, telling our sob story and refusing to leave till they thought of something to do. But as the car in  which we hitchhiked into town stopped in front of a scooter repair shop, I thought better of the project, of our Independence, the humour of the situation, the fact that since our luck couldn’t be any worse it had to change for the better. I told the mechanic what had happened, asked if he were good safe cracker, rode back with him to the scene of the crime, smashed the lock and returned with Lambretta to pick up Sarah and get some breakfast. When I arrived at the shop a man was there with a rickety old car and two children with whom he spoke English. I asked him for a light and started a conversation. Sarah charmed him and within 5 minutes we were good friends, invited for lunch, a shower and shave and rest with his family in a little villa in the middle of town he had been renting for vacation. It was Manna from heaven for us. After freshening up, we both felt like new people, joined the family and found that Frank Green, an Englishman, was the freelance producer of a very good film which Benny had told me about–The Day the Earth Caught Fire– had a wonderful family, lived on a shoestring, and was as happy to have us as guests as we were to be them. I suspect that he fell slightly in [transcribed from spoken word to text in Macmail] love with Sarah. After lunch, the Greens invited us to let the scooter rest for a day, accompany them to a delightful little beach on the coast where they always went and that very few people knew about, have dinner with them and stay over to get a fresh start in the morning. After swimming in the Mediterranean one wants to swim nowhere else. The town of a Grimaud where we stayed was perched on a hill topped by the the untouched ruins of a ninth century château, overlooking more hills, farm land, and sea coast. We talked long into the night with the Greens and the next morning after a delicious breakfast set off for  Aix-en-Provence to try to get in to the festival performance of Don Giovanni the same night.

The name of the individual featured in Atwood’s account, Rick Salutin, also rang a bell.  Someone we must have known in the late 60’s, early 70’s at Columbia, Camp Wabikon, or Vancouver.  Jan suspected that he was the person who’d interviewed us in New York for the summer position we’d applied for  in northern Ontario as a way to escape the City and the Country after having quit our jobs and University apartment and reduced our possessions to what could fit into the Ford Econoline van prepared as a mobile living space.  Her web prospecting revealed that as a grad student, radical Rick was involved with the Columbia strike and with Gordy Wolfe, the Toronto based Director who’d revived the shuttered old summer camp with staff from Camp White Pine and who hired us at Rick’s recommendation as Drama and Nature counselors at the start of our nine-year residence in Canada.

This scholarly article from 1999 quotes and analyses the personal acknowledgements in the Preface of Youth Against Age, the 1985 book version of my dissertation, which was completed 1981, fifteen years after it was started. The relevant passage is found on page 265 of the article.

Thanks Vivian and Judy for forwarding this information.  The fact that it happens to any of us at this age is to be expected, but that it took place two months ago shocked me into recognition of how close what seems far away can actually be.

December 1942-March 2022

Dear Bob

Deborah phoned me with word of your death a couple of weeks ago.  Since then, you’ve been more present to me than even during the intense emails we’ve exchanged since the reunion I attended at your home in 1996. I regretfully declined to join any more of them because of the difficulty I’ve always experienced relating to individuals within the framework of the group. With no one was that contradiction between social and individual relationships more pronounced than with you.

Back in Netherland Park your role as the classic alpha male made you seem larger than life and me to almost disappear as the tiny omega called “mousie.” And when the girl I’d been in love with since fourth grade started going with you the annihilation felt complete. (more…)

Once the phone clock signaled the end of this morning’s meditation, as always, I concluded with the Jewish prayer: “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”  After 30 minutes of effort to calm my troubled thinking, I often find a moment of relaxation in shifting register to this plea before throwing off the blanket, turning on the light and taking up the day’s work.

Today that prayer to the void was accompanied by more self-observation and a silent word: “broken.” An association swam up from below: George Herbert’s “The Broken Altar” and behind it Leonard Cohen’s “cold and broken hallelujah.” Next came the toothy jaws of a literary critic which gulped up both and smiled.